My interest in Absurdist literature and Albert Camus led me to email the blogger Robin Bates, author of the blog BetterLivingThroughBeowulf.Com, and ask him about these subjects. Below is his reply:

Albert Camus was a superstar during his life, in part because he summed up intellectuals’ distress over a world

which old certainties seemed to be vanishing away

when religious belief was on the decline

after a second world war

now with an atom bomb

Existentialism has some connection with the theater of the absurd. If there is no god, the reasoning went, then our lives have no ultimate meaning and our lives are absurd. As put by some: We are just a chemical reaction that occurred on a small pebbling hurling through the vast reaches of interstellar space, and an encounter with a large enough meteor would put an end to everything in a moment. Existentialism was a response to that bleak view of the world.

It’s always useful for me to remember that existentialism has the word “existence” at its core–it’s a philosophy that directly addresses existence questions, such as

why are we here?

where did we come from?

why do we die?

what is the meaning of our suffering, etc?

If there is no meaning to life, then it shouldn’t matter if Meursault shoots the Arab in The Stranger. In The Plague, such a sickness causes us all to question the meaning of life. Is there meaning in pushing a rock up a hill over and over, given that this could be a metaphorical expression of many of our lives.

Existentialists traced their thinking back to a number of others, including

The hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler have been described as existential, with the private eyes seeking to solve sordid crimes, even though the world won’t be that much of a better place even if they are successful. “You’re just a grubby little man in a grubby little world,” one villain tells the detective in Murder My Sweet. In The Maltese Falcon, when pushed to defend why he does what he does, Sam Spade replies, “When you’re partner dies, you’re supposed to do something about it.” It didn’t matter that his partner was a sleaze.

And that gets at one of the existential answers, one that existential authors like Ernest Hemingway also arrived at. If there’s not greater meaning [in life], then you determine a meaning and then you dedicate your life to that meaning. Sisyphus’s life has meaning because he dedicates it to pushing the rock up the hill, even though from another vantage point it’s all absurd. In fact, certain existentialists saw a kind of heroism in dedicating efforts to something which might be absurd.

There’s not much heroism to Vladimir and Estragon waiting around for Godot (God?) in Samuel Beckett’s play–so there’s a thin line between absurdism and existentialism.

Now, there are Christian existentialists, with the apparent absence of God from the world requiring a leap of faith (Kierkegaard). Existentialism is often seen as a very individualist philosophy, which is why it has fallen out of favor with some. After all, as soon as you start talking about families and communities, individual searches can seem somewhat selfish and self-absorbed. But there’s no doubt that existentialism has had a major influence on world literature. A whole generation of young people looking for meaning saw Camus as their spiritual guide.

What was Lincoln’s source of strength? His life as president fraught with rage and ridicule. His wife an unstable and hostile companion. His mental state a constant siege of depression and fear. Seemly imprisoned by his mental illness, he found a source of succor in literature. Lincoln’s life unfolded in three parts: fear, engagement, and transcendence. Lifting himself up from the question of whether he could live, he decided how he would live.

The trials of his life became his weapons in war. His personal suffering prepared him for the nation’s suffering and did not let it overwhelm him as it did so many. Knowing what he knew, of optimism he was suspect. With his essential purpose always in focus, his vision for our nation governed his work. The discipline of his early adult life had tempered a fortitude which endured disappointments. Lincoln’s ingrained strength of purpose prepared him to engage his own awful fear and doubt and triumph.

Literature both prepared him for life’s process and encouraged him to cope. Rather than bury his melancholy, he resurrected it. Reading, reciting, and composing poetry that examined themes of death, despair, and human futility, brought comfort to a man who so often sat alone in a place where his only companions were those dark themes. Lincoln’s single secret achievement of finding a therapy for his incurable malady gives him yet another dimension of greatness. In the depression of key author’s, Lincoln related:

Lord Byron’s: Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth.

What is it (melancholy) but the telescope of truth?

Lincoln read Poe because it was gloomy. The Raven, an emblem of the poet’s melancholy, poeticizes both Poe’s determination to be rational with the prospect of a never-to-leave madness.

Lincoln related best to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. His ambition and existential doubts resonated and were forces in both his objectives and his melancholy. The grasp of literature held Lincoln back from shallow optimism and prevented him from falling into deep despair. He knew that devils and angels battled within all of us and he believed that the better angels of our nature would triumph. He believed in this nation and its ability remain united when challenged.

We all know the feeling of being laughed at but we don’t always feel the need to take action to stop it. Getting back at someone who doesn’t care about the relationship only sets you back with the people who observe the abuse. Trump left the Paris Accord not because it hurt Americans but because its members hurt his feelings by laughing at him. When mockery of a cruel person occurs, the unimaginable insecurity becomes animated. A man’s obsessions bear out in his behavior before they act out in his vengeance. Obsessions build reputations which must be upheld. What is the horrifying story that applies to Trump’s obsession over mockery? Someone refused him and he was permanently embarrassed. He was put on the spot by someone and returned with nothing. Since the time of the laugh, he has determined to stop the laughter no matter what. Stopping a President is a kind of death wish.

Bob Dylan, Gifted Storyteller

Blowin’ In the Wind

A literary education gives principles, sensibilities and an informed view of the world. You can recognize when crazy men are taking over the world and the rest of us are on their doomed voyage. In the end you can see yourself at sea, floating on a coffin, all quiet, and you are reluctant to that honor. Literature influenced song writing by listening to early folk singers. Listening to early folk picks up vernacular and folk lingo became the only vocabulary. Once you loved the world, now you witness all the suffering of mankind. Nature doesn’t notice but you are changed forever. Death is blowin’ in the wind and to honor the dead shades the horror of it. It is preferable to live a life of struggle than stay eternal in death’s place. Better to tell many long stories of simple struggle, and sing the wisdom of a shunned pacifist.

I recoil when someone begins dissecting Genesis with a scientists’ scalpel or a fundamentalist fillet, this article helped me uncoil. Poetry allows wonder to be expressed. Scientific analysis of religion diminishes wonder. Fundamentalists of both religion and science attack wonder with a deaf ear to its poetry. Story truth repeatedly reveals itself to a true thinker, while scientists seek only a single revelation. Scientism’s faith excludes wonder and therefore wisdom escapes it. The most important truths never translate into facts, expressing religion and poetry in inexpressible symbols … emblematic of wonder. Poetry rings insufficiently literal to fundamentalists of both religion and scientism, but brings pleasure to those sensitive to its insufficiencies.

The author seeks to reason how Ivanka’s book, Women Who Work, takes a misapplied quote from Toni Morrison’s book Beloved subjectively interprets this quote:

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

The protagonist in Morrison’s book is raped and beaten before killing her own baby in order to escape slavery. Ms. Trump uses the quote to describe women her enslave themselves to pleasing everybody. The beef the author has with Ivanka’s blandity curating Toni’s masterpiece is quoted from a book review where the reviewer observes that the quotation seems to falsely equates the scars of a business women’s busy work with the scars of slavery. Inappropriate to say the least.

Robin Bates, who wrote the article, says that if Ivanka had actually read the article, he would give here some leeway. After all, her father has expressed interest in her sexually, and a particular scenario in Beloved might render her a pathway out of that troubling conundrum. Clearly, Bates believes, she hasn’t read the book and merely misappropriates the quotation for her own purpose in her own pursuit of wealth. The quote may be relatable to her as something she already knows but that is where it stops. She doesn’t take it deeper, where it is supposed to take her, outside of herself and to a more understanding and wise self. Knowing more about oneself and understanding what an author intended is the hidden value in a quote, a book, an authorship.

Women Who Work is not literature because it merely recirculates platitudes from a position of entitlement and its author listens neither to authors misquoted nor women who work.

For anyone who remembers Watergate and seeks a better analogy to the Comey firing, look no further than Lewis Carroll and his deeply fascinating and subtly suggestive Alice in Wonderland.

In Robin Bates daily blog, he relates the Comey firing to Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. Trump is firing anyone who threatens to investigate him while giving a reason which is obviously not the reason. In Alice in Wonderland the Queen of Hearts, playing croquet, is screaming Off with his/her head once a minute when displeased until there is no one left. The croquet scene is related to Nixon and Watergate, which is in turn related to Trump and Putingate.

The article suggests that NSA head McMaster might be next to be separated from his head. That the Comey firing was a hot example of punishment first – rationale later. And that the country needs the GOP to stand up to Trump the way that Alice stands up to the Queen. Trump is no more dangerous than a slick pack of cards. Grow a spine before this bad dream becomes a living nightmare.

He resents his benefactor, yet takes every advantage of him. Ingratitude is the word but he sees it as someone showing off when a benefit given requires any inconvenience on his part. Pointing out every fault, flaw and misspoken word on another’s part, that person is demonized as a distraction from his own faults, flaws and ill-spoken words. Sometimes benefactors behave badly, but mostly they benefit. Takers stay in the shadows and only expose their bad behavior when they take a reprehensible position as their greed is exposed.

He is dissatisfied because all of his shenanigans to take more than he deserves from those he should be taking care of isn’t fulfilling. He will never have enough. Only the knowledge that he has taken too much will enlighten him. So, not hiding from the ones he should be showering with benefits, stepping up and out to provide benefits so that he doesn’t need a benefactor, becoming the man he was intended to be, being generous when he has nothing to give, are the things that are missing in his life.

The things he selfishly keeps for himself become valueless. In time, he will probably have more, but it will not be enough. In time, he will lose something more precious than the things he has acquired through stealth. One day he will be scared of dying among many possessions and no one to love. The wife and children he had to love and didn’t will be the lost opportunity that gives him the hollow feeling of loss, even with them physically present. Happiness will elude him even as he pursues it through accumulation and separation. As the growing discrepancy between his take and his give widens, so will his dissatisfaction and others disappointment.